a collection of quotes that express the cardinal sensibilities in a particularly apt manner, and a bunch of others I just find striking somehow. No particular order, nor do I necessarily agree.

I do not know what the doctors cure us of, but I know this: they infect us with very deadly diseases, cowardice, timidity, credulity, the fear of death. What matter if they make the dead walk, we have no need of corpses; they fail to give us men, and it is men we need.-Rousseau's Emile. Aldous Huxley called it "iatrogenic disease".

… a little drop of sea water pulls a little membrane around it and rots for a million years on an ancient, forgotten shore, and sprouts little hair-trigger nerves and puny little earthen mechanisms, and stands up on two spindly limbs one day, and says, ‘I am a man,’ and lifts its snout to skies above and says again, ‘I am so beautiful’… -The Smiler, from Malachi Martin,Hostage to the Devil

Yet it would perhaps be thought to be better, indeed to be our duty, for the sake of maintaining the truth even to destroy what touches us closely, especially as we are philosophers or lovers of wisdom; for, while both are dear, piety requires us to honour truth above our friends.-Nichomachean Ethics, I.6

All the shrewd contrivances and safeguards of man had been thrown out of gear by thirty seconds’ twitching of the earth-crust.-Jack London on the San Francisco earthquake.

A new scientific truth does not triumph by convincing its opponents and making them see the light, but rather because its opponents eventually die, and a new generation grows up that is familiar with it. -Max Plank, quoted by Thomas Kuhn

Thinkers who consider the law of God to be a hindrance to human freedom have been misled into regarding obedience as a form of heteronomy or self-alienation, as though God were a hostile power imposing terms on humanity as a defeated enemy. In fact, God’s law proceeds only from benevolence toward creatures whom God loves. The moral law is intended to safeguard human dignity. Human freedom and divine law conspire to the same end.-Avery Cardinal Dulles

Novak was a provost at SUNY-Old Westbury, a new experimental college in the state system caught up in all the higher-ed fads of the day. Students lounged barefoot in class and showed contempt for all authority, including that of the faculty and administrators. Younger professors indulged them, refusing to impose a set curriculum and questioning the appropriateness of grades. Sentimentality for the Vietcong was widespread.

Hearing students cite Marcuse while decrying bourgeois society, Novak thought it a good idea to bring Marcuse to campus for a day of discussion and lecturing. But the admiring conversation he expected to witness didn’t occur. Instead, Novak recounts in his 2013 memoir Writing from Left to Right,

"After mingling with the students, he was affronted and disgusted. At his lecture he set aside his prepared notes and instead described the severe Prussian discipline of his own education: the classics he had to master; the languages he had to learn by exercises and constant tests. His theme was that no one had any standing on which to rebel against the past—or dare to call himself a revolutionary—who had not registered the tradition of the West."

the human race is just a chemical scum on a moderate-sized planet, orbiting around a very average star in the outer suburb of one among a hundred billion galaxies -Stephen Hawking

Men, too, secrete the inhuman. At certain moments of lucidity, the mechanical aspect of their gestures, their meaningless pantomime makes silly everything that surrounds them. A man is talking on the telephone behind a glass partition; you cannot hear him, but you see his incomprehensible dumb show: you wonder why he is alive. This discomfort in the face of man's own inhumanity, this incalculable tumble before the image of what we are, this "nausea," as a writer of today calls it, is also the absurd. Likewise the stranger who at certain seconds comes to meet us in a mirror, the familiar and yet alarming brother we encounter in our own photographs is also the absurd.-Albert Camus

[T]he “resemblance” to which the nominalist appeals is itself a universal. A “Stop” sign resembles a fire truck, which is why we call them both “red.” Grass resembles The Incredible Hulk’s skin, which is why we call them both “green.” And so on. What we have, then, are multiple instances of one and the same universal, “resemblance.” Now the nominalist might seek to avoid this consequence by saying that we only call all of these examples cases of “resemblance” because they resemble each other, without specifying the respect in which they resemble each other. But then the problem just crops up again at a higher level. These various cases of resemblance resemble other various cases of resemblance, so that we have a higher-order resemblance, which itself will be a universal. And if the nominalist tries to avoid this universal by once again applying his original strategy, he will be just faced with the same problem again at yet a higher level, ad infinitum.-Edward Feser, The Last Superstition

We have the natural rights we have precisely as a means of safeguarding our ability to flourish as the kinds of beings we are, to pursue what nature has determined is good for us and perfects us.-Edward Feser

Even while leaning on Aristotle, Galen urges his reader to be wary of pedantic medicine. “If anyone wishes to observer the works of Nature, he should put his trust not in books on anatomy but in his own eyes and either come to me, or consult one of my associates, or alone by himself industriously practise exercises in dissection; but so long as he only reads, he will be more likely to believe all the earlier anatomists because there are many of them.” By his own lights Galen was an experimental physician, constantly appealing to experience.

In a familiar ironly of history, as Galen’s books became sacred texts his own spirit was forgotten. For centuries “Galenism” would be the physicians’ dominant dogma.

-Daniel BoorstinThe Discoverers

The said Indians and all other people who may later be discovered by Christians, are by no means to be deprived of their liberty or the possession of their property, even though they be outside the faith of Jesus Christ; and that they may and should, freely and legitimately, enjoy their liberty and the possession of their property; nor should they be in any way enslaved; should the contrary happen, it shall be null and have no effect. -Pope Paul III, Sublimus Deus, 1537

I loved not as yet, yet I loved to love; and, with a hidden want, I abhorred myself that I wanted not. I searched about for something to love, in love with loving, and hating security, and a way not beset with snares.-Confessions III.1